The Mission Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military

• Author: Major Julie Long
• Pages: 06

160 MILITARY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 182

THE MISSION

WAGING WAR AND KEEPING PEACE WITH AMERICA'S MILITARY1

REVIEWED BY MAJOR JULIE LONG2

There are many differences between the U.S. wars in Vietnam and Iraq, but one stunning similarity is the administrations' reliance on U.S. armed forces to bring radical social change to a country as alien to most soldiers as the planet Mars.3

Dana Priest, author of The Mission, Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military, seems to have spent the better part of 1998 through 2003 traveling the globe with everyone from four-star generals to grunts.4 Her readers are much the better for it. In The Mission, Ms. Priest provides highly engrossing, descriptive accounts of post-Cold War U.S. military engagements, coupled with timely and important observations about how the United States puts its foreign policy into practice. While the book's criticisms are primarily aimed at policy makers and political leaders above the level of most military leaders- and, despite some limitations, such as digressions into stories that lend little to Ms. Priest's overall theme5 and her failure to sufficiently develop her alternative to military peacekeeping-in many ways, The Mission reads like a very engaging "lessons learned" for service members involved in peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations.

Ms. Priest, a Washington Post reporter for more than fifteen years,6

is a consummate storyteller. She colorfully brings to life the exploits of military members in hot spots around the world in an effort to illustrate what she sees as wrong with U.S. foreign policy execution today.7

Indeed, Ms. Priest believes that much of what she sees is flawed. She vividly describes what she terms the U.S. political leadership's lazy over-reliance on a powerful, yet misunderstood military.8 As a consequence of this misplaced proclivity to choose what she terms the easy "quick fix"9 of military engagement, Ms. Priest contends that the United States has failed to grasp a historic opportunity to leverage its unprecedented preeminence and "lead a messy world toward a more stable peace."10

Ultimately, The Mission is Ms. Priest's attempt to demonstrate that nation-building is best accomplished by civilians. She pointedly notes that although the United States has struggled through more than "[t]welve years of reluctant nation-building . . . [it] still [has not] spawned an effective civilian corps of aid workers, agronomists, teachers, engineers - a real peace corps - to take charge of postwar reconstruction . . . ."11 According to Ms. Priest, the consequences of this failure are grave and run the gamut from failed policies12 to human rights abuses13 and even to heinous crimes.14

Ms. Priest broadly argues that following the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. political leaders failed to develop a strategic plan to deal with the

difficult issues confronting the United States in the post-Cold War world.15 Even prior to Communism's fall, and with little public debate, politicians systematically had degraded the capacity of the U.S. civilian foreign policy apparatus, leaving it unable to pursue diplomatic solutions to the challenges arising out of the demise of the bi-polar world.16 Ms. Priest contends that into this vacuum grew a powerful military establishment, headed by the "CinCs," the commanders of the Pentagon's five regional commands,17 who unlike their civilian foreign policy counterparts possessed both the will and the resources to "shape" the world.18

Ms. Priest brings her thesis to life through a series of vignettes that take the reader on an odyssey of travel, including forays with Special Forces troops in Nigeria and Afghanistan, and with CinCs in Indonesia, the Middle East, and Colombia.19 Combining legislative and political

research with anecdotes gleaned from numerous interviews, Ms. Priest first explores the historical development of the regional commands and the CinCs' forty-year climb to their current positions of power.20 Ms. Priest points out the uncomfortable fact that the CinCs, dubbed by Ms. Priest as "proconsuls to the empire,"21 command resources and retinues that far outweigh those of their State Department colleagues.22 In addition to dedicated aircraft,23 the CinCs have "colonels and majors by the dozen . . . [who] plan exercises, share technical assistance, promote the sale or donation of American military equipment, or resolve policy disputes . . . ."24 Perhaps most importantly, and in most stark contrast to the civilian foreign policy agencies, the CinCs have at their disposal Special Forces and conventional troops who can be mobilized to carry out the nation's policy objectives.25 Ms. Priest writes, "Special forces were often the tool of default when U.S. policymakers abandoned more difficult alternatives, such as long-term economic development or political reform won th[r]ough creative diplomatic sticks and carrots." 26

As a result, the CinCs and their troops, rather than the civilian agents who are actually charged with carrying out U.S. foreign policy, are often the face of the United States in foreign countries,27 a fact that Ms. Priest asserts gravely distorts policy outcomes.28

In Colombia, for example, Ms. Priest writes that forty years of civil war, "[c]orrupt government officials, impoverished peasants, and lush jungles . . . conspired to make Colombia a hospitable place for coca farmers and drug traffickers,"29 and the resultant cocaine fueled "an American tragedy with an unending rippling effect."30 She points out that the drug crisis rested on civil and economic under-pinnings, and crucially, that the local regional leadership was historically wary of U.S. military intervention.31 In spite of this, Ms. Priest asserts that the only solution U.S. political leaders truly backed was a military one.32 She reports that even General George Joulwan...